Nordic Breeze | Iberian Seas

Immediately after I got home from the choir trip to Åland I unpacked my weekend bag, packed a suitcase, and headed up to the airport to catch a flight to Barcelona. Tough life, right?

This trip was a mandatory component of the program I am in (EIT InnoEnergy SELECT). Every fall, they bring together both the first and second year SELECT students from all of the participating universities for four days in Barcelona. Many of us from KTH chose to stay in Barcelona for the weekend and see the city. In this post I will share my experience of the program seminar; in a following post I will share my experience as a tourist.

This trip was a wonderful opportunity to meet everybody in the program. For the first year, all SELECT students are either studying at UPC in Barcelona, KTH in Stockholm, or TU/e in Eindhoven (in the Netherlands). Next year, we will all be spread out between a total of about 8 universities. There are only two people in the program studying in Lisbon next year. The other person, Chika, is also at KTH this year so I didn’t get to meet anyone new in Barcelona that I’ll be studying with next year. However, we do have online classes together with all SELECT students and we also work together on a handful of projects throughout the program, such as the Project of the Year (POY) consulting project and the entrepreneurship-focused New Venture Creation Project (NVCP). It was a lot of fun to get to meet everyone in person and start to get to know each other!

The main purpose of this trip was to attend a 3-day seminar at ESADE Business School. We attended three all-day workshops: Managing High Performing Teams, Design Thinking, and Entrepreneurship. The design of the ESADE building was very cool and inspirational (as you can see in the photos below) and I really liked their motto: “Do Good. Do Better.”

In Managing High Performing Teams, we explored personality types, communication styles, team effectiveness, psychological safety, and goal prioritization. We did a really fun group activity where we got to build with Lego (always fun in a room full of engineers!) but with two rules. The first was that each person was given a secret rule that they had to follow and make sure that everyone else was following, but they couldn’t show that rule to anyone else. The second rule was that we weren’t allowed to talk, write, or use any words at all. Using physical gestures, facial expressions, and nonverbal noises we were able to communicate enough to solve the puzzle and successfully build our Lego structure. Through this activity, we got creative with our communication styles and experienced the four stages of team formation: forming, storming, norming, and performing.

In Design Thinking, we followed the design thinking process from start to finish for the problem of “desire paths” – the informal dirt paths that are created in parks or on school campuses when people don’t follow the existing paths. We used the iterative design thinking steps of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test to understand the problem and brainstorm possible solutions. My favorite moment from this workshop was when we were introduced to the brainstorming technique of the “Evil Brainstorm.” With this technique, you brainstorm ways to make the problem worse and then you try to flip all of those on their head to find ways to make the problem better.

Entrepreneurship is a fundamental component of the EIT InnoEnergy program. Throughout this year, everyone in the SELECT program will participate in the New Venture Capital Project (NVCP). In this project, we will work in teams of 4-5 to come up with a business idea, show that it is a real market opportunity, design and validate a business model to exploit that opportunity, plan for the deployment of the project, and pitch it to investors. In this workshop, we were introduced to the NVCP, defined entrepreneurship, talked about managing uncertainty and risk, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of developing a new business inside a company (intrepreneurship) versus outside of a company (entrepreneurship). We also explored what a business model looks like and how to create and validate one.

I enjoyed all three workshops. One of the main reasons I chose the SELECT program was that it combined engineering and business education in one program. With my engineering degree and engineering management minor from Vanderbilt and four years working as a Deloitte consultant, I have been exposed to most of this material before and it felt familiar. These workshops were a great refresher and an opportunity to put the lessons into practice in an international environment. SELECT students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and for some students this was the very first time they had been introduced to topics like design thinking, psychological safety, or communication styles. In many other countries, engineering programs are much more focused on technical skills. This seminar made me really appreciate the amount of education and experience I already have in these topics and it got me excited to put all of this into action in my projects throughout the program.

The fourth and final day of the fall seminar was focused on the SELECT projects of the year (POY). In both years of the program, students participate in a year-long sustainable energy consulting project in groups of about eight. In the morning session, the second year students introduced their projects of the year. For the second year POY, groups have to come up with their own project topics and find a company to work with. For the first year POY, project topics and sponsors are identified by program leadership. In the afternoon session on the fourth day we found out what our project options will be for our POY this year. Project topics included things like small scale renewable energy production, biogas, carbon emission accounting, and grid stability. It was exciting to finally hear about the projects we will be working on throughout the year. Once my POY project gets assigned and gets off the ground a bit I’ll write a post about it.

The SELECT fall seminar was very educational and a lot of fun. It was a proper kickoff to the program now that all three universities have started their semesters (UPC in Barcelona starts a few weeks later than KTH in Stockholm). I had a great time getting to know the other people in the program and I’m really looking forward to working together with them on a variety of projects throughout the next two years!

Stay tuned for my next post to see what else I got up to while I was in Barcelona…